Garden shears are well known implements which are used to trim and shape vegetation and plant material. For example, such shears are often used by gardeners or homeowners to trim foliage from evergreen bushes to shape the bush to a desired form, to cut branches from small trees or bushes, and the like. When using such shears, the debris material cut by the shears simply falls down into the bush or onto the ground. This requires the user to go back and pick this debris up in a final clean up step. This clean up is both time consuming and labor intensive and is obviously a disadvantage of using known garden shears.
Some prior art shears have attempted to avoid the usual clean up by providing the shears with some way of retaining the cut debris on the shears. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 2,337,285 to Widdowson discloses hedge shears having an attached cradle formed by relatively rigid posts 3 and wire strands 5. According to the Widdowson patent, "the foliage cut during the trimming of a hedge or other plants will be effectively held by the basket or cradle when the blades B are in closed relation so that such trimmings can be readily deposited in a can or other receptacle."
U.S. Pat. No. 4,464,837 to Amstutz is generally similar to Widdowson. Amstutz discloses wire members rigidly affixed to the blades of garden shears for forming a gripping device allowing the vegetation being cut to be gripped between the wire members.
While prior art devices have attempted to solve the problem by catching the debris material arising from use of the garden shears, they all have various disadvantages. For one thing, the cradle arrangement of Widdowson or the wires of Amstutz are open over much of their surface allowing small pieces of debris to simply fall through this structure without being caught or retained. Since fairly small pieces of debris often arise when the shears are being used in a vertical or inclined orientation to cut off just small amounts of material when providing a desired final shape to the sides of a bush, these prior art devices would be relatively ineffective for their stated purpose with this type of debris material.
In addition, the above noted prior art devices comprise arrangements of posts and wires that are rigidly affixed to the blades of the shears. In some cases, this is done by welding the components together and to the blades. In other cases, this is done by using bolts or the like extending through holes drilled into the blades. In any case, it is relatively difficult and expensive to manufacture and provide debris retaining means of this type on the shears. In addition, such debris retaining means is not retrofittable to existing garden shears without having to specially modify the blades of the shears in some manner.